Doin’ it eBay…

As the sounds of The Seatbelts assaults my senses… I actually have this one turned all the way up right here at my workstation in the middle of the night. One of the many blessings of working solo for twelve hour stretches is the simple fact that I can play whatever I want whenever I want and I don’t bother anyone. As some of you have come to know, I’ve switched back to nights over the weekend, and so far so good. I think that my body has given up the fight and will now allow me to pretty much sleep whenever I tell it to sleep, as opposed to the other method of just feeling zonked all the time.

When I did the shift turnover to my co-worker yesterday morning, we got into a little conversation about the immediate future of our little happy-go-lucky network operations center here at PayPal, and it would seem that within the next three or four weeks, we might be closing up shop here at Mountain View and moving over to work at eBay HQ in Campbell. So, I had something of a little anxiety attack about that. Let’s revisit the whole source of why that happened, just so I’ll be perfectly clear later when it happens again of why we keep certain things buried down deep and under heavy security lockouts. Now, I’d mentioned this as a possible course of action for upper management already. As we’re seeing more and more eBay infestation over here, we’re also running out of room to house them all. All of IT recently got marching orders to pack up and move down to the first floor, and we’re losing all but one of the conference rooms in order to accomodate the moving of two teams from the third floor. I think they’ve even torn down both of the former CEO/CTO offices up there and have converted the space to more cubicles. Another idea was to redesign the cubicles to Acer America size, which was roughly the same amount of space found in a foyer closet, like back in the old days when elbow room was a luxury and you could fit six people in the space one of our normal cubes takes up. Of course, even then, you would still run into the whole space limitation anyway, plus the angering of the IT people, who’re pretty well-adjusted to having to give up the large cubes we had over at Palo Alto.

So, with the moving of the NOC peeps over to eBay to consolidate their NOC with ours, I shall most likely be within the proximity of my ex-wife and her friends on a semi-daily basis. While this is a load of suck from where I’m sitting, something tells me that there’s a high degree/possibility that this could also be a good thing. But, will I have the same amount of creature comfort I have here at PayPal? I don’t know, really. I know they have like a tremendous amount of staff on site at any given time, as opposed to the whole lone samurai thing we have going on over here. I want to bring my sauve machines over there, because I’ve spent a good six months getting them working exactly as I like, and I pride myself on having my own space with two machines on it for those moments when having two machines is very handy. But the eBay philos and the PayPal philos don’t always mesh, so I’m totally hanging on every word my VP says with regard to this whole new arrangement.

When I heard the first time, my reaction was… time to find a new job. But, that’s insane and just the kneejerk reaction or solution to what could potentially be a major problem. I mean, I love this job. But working over there could change that to a hellhole I dread going to every weekend. Suddenly, having four days off is more awesome than three or two, right? But I don’t want it to get to a point where I’m moaning and groaning about how shitty my job is, simply because of the people I have to work with. I’ve been resisting this idea in my own way, but with the space problems, it looks like it’s just completely unavoidable. It’s not like I’m worried about my ex being malicious or turning my job into a nightmare, but when you’ve got such an emotional wound, there’s really nothing that can be said or done and knowing me and my immature self, I’m liable to react moronically just to satisfy my damaged pride… and there you have it. I’m unemployed. But then again, I’ve also been learning on when it’s proper to just keep my mouth shut and take it like a man. So we’ll see what happens. At best, everything will work out and eBay will be like a ten times better place to work at… at worse, I guess I could transfer to another department or hey… maybe with my language skills, I could move to eBay International and work out of the Japan office. That would rule…

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2 Comments

inetmonkey
on March 9, 2003 at 00:13

Damn. I dunno if “load of suck” really covers this. I think “living in pain” or possibly “waking agony” might be more apt descriptions. Whatever its faults might have been, it was usually professional when it came to work, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I think the worst you can expect is to get shoved onto a night shift with a lot more people.

saebel
on March 9, 2003 at 05:46

As the other person commenting noted, it will feel like walking agony. Not in any overt “I’m going to topple over” sort of way, but you will feel it and it will be a drag. However, humans seem to be able to build incredible thresholds of tolerance to pain; you’ll eventually be able to handle the walking agony on a level that makes you want to tear out your hair, but doesn’t directly make you want to die.

Then again, maybe I’m the only one stupid enough to have setting up things so that I ended up having two exes in two different groups: at work and at my main hobby.